After going three full years with no whitetail meat, I’d placed a tender young doe high on my hit list.

THE SOUND OF DRY oak leaves crunching in the otherwise silent Wisconsin woods brought back fond memories. Perched high in a tree overlooking a well-used deer trail, I watched a doe as she slowly closed into bow range. Three long years had passed since I’d last hunted whitetails, and their circumspect twitchiness had slipped my mind.

So had their tendency to pinpoint my location, even when I’m perched 20 feet up a tree in the dense woods, but that’s what happened. The doe stepped into a shooting lane at 20 yards, and as I raised my bow, her head craned up and her eyes locked on me.

I froze!

Two or three minutes passed before she looked away, at which point she moved out of my shooting lane and back into the thick brush. With anticipation, I watched her every step. Soon she walked into another opening, and I came to full draw. She was looking directly away from me, yet she bolted as I pulled back my bow. In the dead-calm woods, she must have heard my arrow sliding over the rest.

The doe darted back into the trees, trotted a short distance, and then stopped again, her vitals exposed by a fist-sized hole in the thicket, 15 yards away. As I released, she dropped about eight inches. Hitting the spine, the arrow dropped her in her tracks, and quickly I followed up with a heart shot.

With my nerves thoroughly rattled, I sat down and reflected on the joys of Midwestern whitetail hunting.

COMING HOME AGAIN felt great. Eleven years before, I had moved from Wisconsin to sunny Colorado, but I have tried to return to Wisconsin every November to hunt whitetails. Un-fortunately, the past three seasons I’d been unable to make the trip, and I had begun to miss Wisconsin’s cloudy, gloomy weather, and its whitetail hunting. In 2006, after several physically tough big game seasons in Colorado -- aren’t they all? -- I was looking forward to resting my tired bones in a Wisconsin treestand for a week and basking in the gloom. Essentially, this trip was about getting back to my roots as a whitetail hunter. It was a homecoming.

My brother Fred, a lifelong Wisconsin resident, and I rendezvoused in the town of Rice Lake, where we discussed plans. Fred’s buddy Dave had granted us permission to hunt his land in northwestern Wisconsin. According to Dave, his property had been rifle hunted over the years, but no one ever bowhunted there.

Fred and I were grateful for the opportunity to hunt Dave’s property. In the past, we had roamed mainly public lands -- state and national forests -- that had yielded spotty results. Unlike public grounds, Dave’s chunk of real estate would belong exclusively to us during our stay.

Arriving at Dave’s cabin on November 2, Fred and I unpacked our gear, and then Dave showed us around. His 80-acre parcel, consisting primarily of oak ridges surrounded by neighbors’ open fields, is a deer haven. As soon as we began scouting, we found a major runway peppered with rubs. Fred decided to place his portable blind beside this trail.

I then discovered a line of scrapes on the opposite end of the big woodlot. With Fred’s help, I strapped my Gorilla treestand about 20 feet up a hefty oak, 15 yards downwind from a large scrape. Of all the scrapes I had found, this one seemed to be the most frequently visited.

That evening, sensing we were in for some real action, Fred and I discussed our strategies with unbridled optimism. As corny as it sounds, before turning in for the night we gave each other a high-five.